Thursday, August 21, 2008

tonight, while reading, i caught a glimpse of my bookshelf. why, i wondered, do i have so many books i care nothing for? books i'm done with, or never intend to start?

well, i plan to give these books away. but first i want to offer them to my friends. so, feel free to follow this link and put your name in the "Receiver" column if you'd like any of the books . add some comments if you want. the books aren't sorted in any manner. i just dumped the info into this spreadsheet.

and by all means, feel free to list your own books you'd like to give away.

i will be sure to get you your book(s) in a timely fashion (but don't expect amazon prime speeds!)

Sunday, August 17, 2008

i love alfred hitchcock. vertigo is one of my favorite movies. so, recently, i saw north by northwest.

now, to be honest, it isn't as good as vertigo. however, it has some wonderful scenes. in the scene below, from right at the beginning of the movie, a case of mistaken identity turns into something far more sinister. i think this part is played to perfection, and martin landau, who you see on the right in the still below, is superb. i felt uncomfortable just thinking about the absurdity of it all..

when you enter the exhibit area, you first only see a girl blowing at you. exactly like the video below:

then, you turn around and see a second screen (shown in this next video, be patient):

can you guess what's going on? it's not easy from these videos.

anyway, the artist erected two screens, one with a woman blowing at the camera, and another, across from the woman's screen, depicting a street in shanghai. whenever the woman blows, the other screen speeds up. it's a wonderful visual and aural depiction of the rapid growth and change in shanghai that has swept up the city. now imagine walking in an art space and constantly hearing that blowing sound from the first video. a bit eerie!

(i realize now that this post is on the order of a lara post.. something i try to avoid, noting that blog readers have no attention span these days [i certainly don't!] .. but i feel the temptation to leave it all in)

a friend recently used the phrase "friendship bucket" as a metaphor representing the state of a relationship. when i read this phrase i thought of leaky buckets, buckets with patches, refilling a bucket with water, or leaving a bucket out in the sun and seeing all the water dry up (the bucket above represents a really really old friendship!).

but then i got all geeky and started thinking about the effectiveness of such a metaphor (i think we can thank jono for that, who often pontificates on things like this over on his blog). for example, the state of a relationship is really an intersubjective thing -- so either friends share the same bucket and compromise on the representation ("i thought our bucket had two holes, a small patch and was 3/4 full -- how could you think it was only 1/2 full!") or, more reasonably, the friendship bucket is an individual's view on a particular relationship.

ok. but there still seems to be something missing. for instance, if i had a metaphor for the state of a relationship, i'd want it to either cleanly capture the current state, or the history. ideally, both. i don't think a bucket does either of these very well. for instance, if your bucket is meant to capture history, then how do you make sense of the current "fullness"? obviously there was some reason we'd say the bucket is 3/4 full (it got there somehow?) -- but what was the pour history? if that seems a bit ridiculous, and your bucket is really just a reflection of now, then you also run into problems because the way we (or at least i) think about relationships is hardly ahistoric -- the history is there and immediately foregrounds when i bring a friend to mind. and a bucket is an object i think of as having history -- indeed, a patch on a bucket was placed at a particular time, and in this metaphor might represent some form of friendship repair that may not be immediate but is nonetheless important.

so friendship bucket isn't resonating with me. and you probably think this is quite ridiculous -- who meditates on the effectiveness of such a metaphor? well, i do! :)

i think a few elements are missing in this metaphor. here they are:- a clear distinction between what i think of the relationship, what i think the other person might think, and maybe some objective measures (when we last met up?)- a way of tracking the movement of the relationship- a method for thinking about this relationship in comparison to other similar relationships in your life

this actually leads me to discuss a fantastic work by intel seattle. in elder care homes, a major problem is social isolation amongst the elders. having had a grandmother who was in a nursing home, i intimately understand the problem. workers at homes really try to keep the elders engaged with various others (family, friends, people at the home).

so what intel did was create a very simple display. it shows a solar system, with the central object, the sun, representing the elder. the orbiting "planets" are people in the elder's social network. the distance between a planet and the sun is a reflection of the social closeness of the elder and the person, at that time. in this case, the proximity was based on interactions (phone calls, visits, length of these interactions). the display showed preliminary success when compared to a control case. indeed, elders who used the display would try to bring in outer planets by getting in touch with the represented people.

so, now the question -- why is this just for elders? it likely seems strange to think of having such a detailed reflection on your relationships. we keep this stuff in our head. but as a mechanism for self-reflection, and potentially as a mechanism for mak

i'd want to incorporate a few things into this display:- reflection of my impression of the relationship. maybe just an emoticon on the planet?- a method for seeing the movement of the planets over time, so you can see how different relationships have evolved. the faded trajectory above tries to do that

anyway i think i'll end here and continue these thoughts in the future.